PRO BASKETBALL: OVERVIEW; Nets Are Sold for $300 Million, And Dream Grows in Brooklyn

Bruce C. Ratner, the developer who wants to move the New Jersey Nets to downtown Brooklyn, reached an agreement yesterday to buy the team for $300 million, defeating a similar offer by Charles Kushner and Senator Jon S. Corzine, the team said.

There is no guarantee that Mr. Ratner will be able to fulfill his vision in Brooklyn, where sports fans are still haunted by memories of the Dodgers' departure to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. The arena would be built on the same site the Dodgers were rebuffed from buying.

Mr. Ratner faces numerous obstacles, including having land condemned and having railroad tracks moved, before he can move the Nets to Brooklyn when the team's lease at Continental Arena expires in 2008.

But the first step in building a new arena for the Nets is complete: the purchase of the team. Without the team, Mr. Ratner has said, the $2.5 billion commercial and residential complex designed by Frank Gehry, with the Nets' arena as the centerpiece, would be dead.

Edwin Stier, president of the Nets' ownership group, Community Youth Organization, said: ''We're in the final stages of negotiating an agreement with Bruce Ratner. The contract terms have been finalized and we're putting the paperwork together.''

For most of the past week, Mr. Ratner and Mr. Kushner were able to examine long-withheld and detailed financial records about the team, allowing them to form substantial, final bids.

On Monday, Mr. Ratner formalized his month-old $300 million bid and negotiators began to clarify the elements of his offer, including the long-term salary obligations he would assume.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kushner presented two offers: one, of $267.5 million in cash, and a second, consisting of $200 million upfront and $100 million over several years, one official involved in the negotiations said. But that was considered inadequate, and the decision was made to complete the deal with Mr. Ratner.

Despite Mr. Kushner's willingness yesterday to raise his offer to $300 million upfront, the Nets and their negotiators decided that they had finished their contract with Mr. Ratner and chose not to consider Mr. Kushner's final bid.

''He just wasn't there,'' one executive who has been briefed throughout the talks said of Mr. Kushner. ''Ratner wanted this thing so bad, he did what it took to get it.''

Bob Sommer, a spokesman for Mr. Kushner, a Florham Park, N.J., real estate developer, said, ''Charlie Kushner bid $300 million in cash today to keep this team in New Jersey and is disappointed in the result.''

The C.Y.O. board agreed to the deal's terms, and the contract now goes for approval tomorrow to YankeeNets, the holding company for the Nets and the Yankees, which is on the verge of being dissolved. Approval is also needed from three-quarters of the teams in the National Basketball Association to buy the franchise and a simple majority to move it.

A move to Brooklyn would mean another move for the peripatetic franchise. It began life as the New Jersey Americans of the American Basketball Association in Teaneck, N.J., then played in Commack, N.Y.; West Hempstead, N.Y.; Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y.; Piscataway, N.J.; and finally found permanence in 1981 when it became a tenant of what is now Continental Arena.

The Nets have often struggled on the court but won the Eastern Conference championship the past two seasons. Still, the Nets are next to last in average attendance among the N.B.A.'s 29 teams this season.

The team's value has exploded since Roy Boe paid $1.1 million for the A.B.A. franchise in 1969. At $300 million, the price is double what Community Youth Organization, led by Raymond Chambers and Lewis Katz, paid for it in 1998, a year before they merged it with the Yankees into YankeeNets. But it ranks behind the record $360 million paid in 2002 for the Boston Celtics.

The sale to Mr. Ratner, whose company is also the development partner of The New York Times Company in a new building for the newspaper's headquarters, culminates a six-month process.

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First there were three bidders: Mr. Ratner, who started at $275 million; the Kushner group, which includes Mr. Corzine, the United States senator from New Jersey, and which opened at $250 million; and Charles B. Wang, the co-owner of the Islanders, at $265 million. They were later joined by Stuart Feldman, a venture capitalist who never publicly discussed his $257.5 million offer or his intentions for the team. Mr. Wang dropped out in frustration with the process, and Mr. Feldman was never a serious competitor.

The effort to sell the Nets has been marked by recriminations between owners of the Yankees and the Nets, as well as among Nets owners themselves.

''It took so long because the personality clashes at YankeeNets created an untenable situation,'' said Joseph Ravitch, a managing director of Goldman Sachs, one of the team's investment bankers. ''The agreement reached in December to separate C.Y.O. from Yankee Holdings was a critical step in expediting the sale of the team.''

Community Youth Organization bought the Nets with the idea of moving them to Newark to help revive its economy. Mr. Katz and Mr. Chambers pledged to pour the profits into a newly formed charity. But the team lost tens of millions of dollars and failed to complete a deal for an arena in Newark, leading to a split between Mr. Chambers and Mr. Katz and ultimately the decision to sell.

Earlier this week, George Zoffinger, president of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which owns Continental Arena, criticized Mr. Katz and Alan Landis, another Nets owner, and vowed to block Mr. Ratner from taking the Nets name to Brooklyn.

''We think a lot of N.B.A. owners are going to want to be in this market,'' he said. ''I suggest Ratner name the team after himself: the Brooklyn Rats. Katz and Landis will fit right in.''

In the final stages of their partnership, Nets owners refused to provide bidders with access to financial information necessary to assess the team's value until they were assured last month that YankeeNets would adopt a plan to dissolve, an official involved in the negotiation said.

The Ratner group, whose partners include the hip-hop entrepreneur Jay-Z and Vincent Viola, chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, has been trying to create a proposal that would encounter little resistance from government officials and community opponents. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been an enthusiastic supporter of the project, but the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki has been been relatively quiet.

A top state official said the governor did not want to be accused of poaching on New Jersey assets and was concerned about the growing list of teams seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in state subsidies for new arenas and stadiums, including the Jets, the Yankees, the Mets, the Knicks and the Rangers.

The project has been embraced by many Brooklyn politicians as the antidote to the loss of the Dodgers and as the crystallization of the borough's economic comeback.

But Patti Hagan, a leader of the Prospect Park Heights Coalition, said the project would eliminate 237 jobs and homes for 864 people.

''This is an example of developer imperialism,'' she said. ''The emperor has decided to take over 10 acres of private property and abolish all the jobs and homes that exist here. Mr. Ratner should know he has a fight on his hands.''

In addition to community opposition, Mr. Ratner faces extensive attendance and revenue losses while the team stays in New Jersey before the move to Brooklyn.

Dean Bonham, a sports industry analyst, said: ''There is no magic solution to keeping fans in the Meadowlands when you're potentially heading for Brooklyn. But I would deliver the message that a new era for basketball is dawning in New York, he's building a state-of-the-art facility and if you want to be part of something new and fun, come participate with us.''

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A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2004, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: PRO BASKETBALL: OVERVIEW; Nets Are Sold for $300 Million, And Dream Grows in Brooklyn. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe